I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.
It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
I've long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths.
The deeper I go into mythology, the more I find. I originally did five 'Percy Jackson' books. I thought that would cover Greek mythology and I couldn't have been more wrong. It's ever-expanding.
Theseus made unscrupulous use of Ariadne (whom he left on an island where Bacchus later found her-I always think that really meant she took to drink, poor girl).
When I was a kid, my grandparents were Greek immigrants on my father's side. My grandfather used to read me Greek myths, in which there are a great many goddesses and stories of strong women. And I was entranced by them. Then I started reading science fiction very young, and I loved it.
Since the Greek myths, the greatest stories are premised on the idea of, 'A stranger arrives.'
For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was 'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.'
Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.
The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
All the superhero stuff is Greek myths and Greek gods, wearing tights and capes. That's what they are. That's what I gravitate towards.
Cacus.” I’d had years of practice looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn’t know. It’s a skill of mine. Annabeth keeps telling me to read a book of Greek myths, but I don’t see the need. It’s easier just to have folks explain stuff.
There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.
I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing for prescientific people.
Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in. To keep these characters static - like Superman was invented in the '30s, Wonder Woman in the '40s - if they were still operating under those kinds of constraints, they'd die. These pop cultures, just like Greek myths, they have to reflect the time their stories are being told. That's what makes them relevant.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
I like myself, but I won't say I'm as handsome as the bull that kidnapped Europa.
Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.
